PARTICIPANTS
Benjamin Bratton

The work of theorist, author and educator Benjamin Bratton focuses on the architectonic histories of media as social institutions of (de) structuration and collective inhabitation. His writings include Airport Architectonics: Terrorism, (Sur)urbia, Infotainment; Sous les PavesLes Halles, May 1968; Software and Habitus; Y2k Entomology; and, with Roger Friedland, Architectural Social Theory. He is a founder and editor (with Robert Niedeffer) of the electronic journal Speed: Technology/Media/Society.

Bratton is a Phd candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and teaches at a number of institutions, including the USC School of Fine Arts, UCSB Film School, and the Southern California Institute for Architecture, where he recently organized the Terrorism and Architecture symposium (with Norman Klein).

    Symposium Abstract: Terrorism + Architecture

The specter of destruction haunts the architectural imaginary. From the debris of the archeological dig and the fragmentation of deconstructivist forms, to the radical violence of the terrorist attack and the society of control modeled on the airport security environment, the integrity of architecture is menaced. Likewise, the production and destruction of social forms through revolution, war, or more everyday practices take shape as and against architecture. The terrorist attack screens for us not just the inherently contested character of what it destroys, it illuminates both the irreducibly conflicted quality of space and the deeply architectonic language of social conflict.